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Julie Christie interview

Columbia Road, in the East End of London, is thronged on weekends. Every Sunday, it blooms into a flower market. Visit on a weekday, however, when the street is noiseless and half the shops are shut, and you may think you have strayed onto a film set. So it felt appropriate to see Julie Christie arrive on Columbia Road one recent Friday. Her limousine of choice was an old bicycle with a wicker basket, and her entrance, through the doors of the Royal Oak pub, could not have been less grand. Of the two solitary drinkers who sat there, only one looked up.

Here was a woman to whose tune, in the nineteen-sixties, all of London swung. Historians of the period are advised to read her body language in “Darling” as a guide to the emergence of the gadabout. Christie still keeps a place in the city, although she recently spent five years in California, where her partner, the journalist Duncan Campbell, was posted as a correspondent for the Guardian. Like many British actresses, Christie (born in 1940 in India, the daughter of a tea planter) has a touch of the peregrine spirit—“I’m not sure I really come from anywhere,” she said. She owns a house in Wales, and taught herself Welsh after joining a campaign there against the dumping of nuclear waste. The protest worked. “They don’t bury it in the mountains anymore,” she said. Who could say no to Julie Christie?

The compound is unmistakable: shyness and spotless manners—maximum radiance meets minimum vanity—plus the trenchant political urge to know her own mind and speak it. If you had to name another actor who projects the same two-tone mystery, it would be Warren Beatty; no wonder they were linked for so long. Of her profession, Christie said, “I never know what it is that I’m meant to be doing,” sounding like a child in a school play. She then launched into a defense of Moazzam Begg, the British Muslim who was detained in Bagram and Guantánamo until 2005, before moving seamlessly into a discussion of the role that she turned down in “American Gigolo.” (“I just thought the woman was getting a rotten deal.”) Keeping up with Christie—the flow of her eagerness and her indignation—can be hard work, not least because both are voiced in the most serene of tones. If she hadn’t been an actress, she would have made an excellent shrink.

All these qualities—the tough, the delicate, the unshockable—are present in her latest film, “Away from Her.” Opening this week, the movie is directed by Sarah Polley, who is, according to Christie, “a hundred times more mature than, for instance, me.” Playing Fiona, a Canadian woman succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease, she proves her ability to portray characters less outspoken than she is. In earlier days, Fiona was betrayed by her husband, but, as Christie says, “she did what many women all over the world did: she kept quiet.” For the Fionas of this world, “it’s as if the sixties never happened.” Set against that are the startling closeups: Christie’s face, with coiling gray hair and undimmed blue eyes, filling the screen. If Penélope Cruz or Jennifer Lopez sees this movie, she may just give up and become a librarian.

Christie works sparingly these days, although she was not so lofty as to refuse a part in “Troy.” (“Absolute heaven. I got to do one whole day in a Maltese bay, a blissful bay, sitting in one of those director’s chairs with Brad Pitt, who is a charming and thoughtful young man. What could be nicer?”) The best directors, like Nicolas Roeg and François Truffaut (who claimed that “she hides behind her hair because she’s so afraid of being found out”), have always swarmed to her, and there are still some, like Todd Solondz and Pedro Almodóvar, who, to judge by her plaudits, shouldn’t hesitate to pick up the phone. She both needs and repays the confidence of filmmakers, from the David Lean who cast her in “Doctor Zhivago” to the Beatty who guided her through “Shampoo”—“I was aware of the fact that I was in safe political hands,” she said.

Yet the person who emerged from the Royal Oak was clearly more than able to take care of herself and defend her opinions to the hilt. Told that she should see “The Lives of Others,” the award-winning movie about East Germany, Christie paused, then re-plied, “I’m not sure I can bear to see a film they gave the Oscar to, that tells you what awful people Communists are.” And with that she laughed, unlocked her bike, and pedalled off into the sunshine. ♦

Anthony Lane has been a film critic for The New Yorker since 1993. He is the author of “Nobody’s Perfect.”